


Planets, the pair of them

by Keenir



Series: This Is How It Happens [1]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-08 19:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1136648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keenir/pseuds/Keenir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt:	Loki came back to Earth for just one thing: her.   Snowy stuff, dom!Loki (but nothing forceful)</p>
<p>Summary:		Loki has come back for Jane, and takes her far and wide.  And the devil’s in the details.</p>
<p>Set:	an unspecified length of time following <span class="u">Thor: The Dark World</span>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planets, the pair of them

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jacksparrowisperfection](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jacksparrowisperfection).



> Let me know if this isn’t what you had in mind; I can retry if you like.

* * *

_It wasn’t hard to do work, provided I have something to work on,_ Jane thought. _Either let SHIELD keep tying my hands and “archiving” my work before I can publish it; or I find something mainstream to work on, and know SHIELD and HYDRA are tapping my phones and email. Or I could retire._

_Yeah._

“Thanks for coming over,” Emilia Per said.

“Thanks for giving me something to do,” Jane said, looking over from the charts of possible exoplanetary candidate systems the computer had narrowed a particular starfield down to.

“Eh, you saved my bacon. I finally get to pay you back.”

~

“Come up with any new answers to Fermi?” Emilia asked on another occasion. _We must’ve thought up a few thousand possible reasons for the Great Silence back in our University days, some hairbrained, some quite good._

“Not as many as I’d like,” Jane said.

“Got hung up on that Kardeshev transportation idea of yours?” _How to go from point A to point B if you’re a super-advanced civilization._

“Yeah.”

~

Jane was working late later that week, frowning at the readings she was looking at in a Red Dwarf star. “That shouldn’t work,” she muttered, and thought she heard something back by the room’s door, well behind her.

“Hello?” Jane asked, rising from her chair, half wondering _has SHIELD or HYDRA finally decided I’m too great a security risk left unattended?_

“Show yourself,” Jane told whomever was there, not that anyone complied if there was anyone there. When she reached the door, she spun to face said door and saw –

“Loki?” Jane asked, lowering the fire extinguisher she’d picked up on her way over. “What are you doing… Wait,” frowning at the impossible sight of him.

“Jane Foster,” Loki replied, not sounding remotely surprised to see her. Looking around and not seeing the person he had thought for certain would be here, Loki asked, “Where is - ?” _Surely he still basks in your presence._

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Jane said firmly. “I thought you were dead.”

“As had I,” Loki says offhandedly.

Jane lets that drop, quid pro quo complete. “What brings you by?”

“You.”

“Me?” _Me??_

“You wish to study the depths and fabric of the cosmos, do you not? I feel it best to avoid Midgard and Asgard for a time. Shall I count for you the number of worlds which fit both our needs?”

Remembering her check-up in Asgard, Jane asked, “How much would I have to re-learn, and how much would I have to re-build?”

“That depends upon which world we go to,” Loki said.

“Whether they’re apes or angels?”

“Whether they place much or nigh importance upon space.”

“And if I say thanks but no?” Jane asked.

To his credit, he looked at least a bit like it didn’t matter; other than that bit… “I leave. Your night continues as it had been unfolding.”

“Ah,” she said, and _have to admit, more of the same isn’t something I relish. Particularly not in these circumstances._ “Let’s go, then,” Jane said.

“Are you ready?” Loki asked, holding out a hand.

“I don’t have to pack, if that’s what you mean,” she said, and while he was processing that, _What the hell…_ Jane thought, taking his hand, and pulled their faces together, enjoying the look of surprise on his face.

Whilst the kiss kept, Loki moved his free hand to splay across her back. Jane was curious if this was his way of trying to keep pace and one-up her, or if there was another motive in play.

And he leaned forwards, curious at what point she would object.

She didn’t. _How far can I lean back? You’d be shocked, Loki. Though – teleporting us to a bed? Or going to do a last-minute turn?_

He didn’t. Leaned at an ever-greater angle until they fell.

And fell.

_My inner ears say we’re not tilting any more, but the blood’s not rushing to my head. Well, no gravity-related rushing anyway._

And then, _It’s like what Buddha said, I didn’t realize my feet weren’t on the ground until I felt the ground underfoot now. Could’ve added it up, figured it out…_

Loki ended the kiss.

“Where are we?” Jane asked him as snowflakes landed atop her head and on any part of them that the light breeze deposited it.

“Utsir,” Loki said.

_Which tells me exactly nothing._ “Who used to live here?” Jane asked, looking at the cabin veiled by the ever-falling snow.

“Neteru, in the time of their predominance. Beta Ray Bill gave it to us, before he went off on an adventure without us.” _I doubt even Thor remembers this place; doubt too Sif would revisit here._

“They’re gone?” Jane asked, feeling the word ‘neteru’ was familiar. _Not a Norse word, though…_

“Only from this cabin. There are more of them on this world.”

“Why this world in particular?”

His face mirrored his confusion.

“Surely there are billions of worlds in the universe.”

“Fewer friendly lands than you might think,” Loki said, and Jane wondered if ‘friendly’ was a synonym for ‘habitable,’ or if Loki meant something else. “You wish to be out from SHIELD’s argusine gaze.”

“I do,” Jane said, slightly curious why his metaphor was from Greek myth. “You?”

“Similar enough,” was Loki’s muttered response. “Will you be going inside, or do you wish to stay outdoors a while?”

“Outside, definitely,” Jane said. “I want to – figure out how this is happening,” she said, even though Loki walked off partway through. She stayed where she stood, taking everything in, and adding it all up.

Every snowflake drifted down on gentle breezes, and melted when they kissed the ground. Soon enough, her mind could picture the meteorological conditions which would produce such an outcome.

Eventually, her eyes slid over to where Loki was standing on the – _not rock, not grass; some sort of moss –_ looking out at some oceanward point on the horizon. And she went over and stood beside him.

Neither moved closer, but nor did either move away.

They stayed there, like that, a while longer. “Is it an eternal snow?” Jane asked.

“By day,” Loki answered. “By night, something else is falling.”

“Oh?”

A half-formed dimly-remembered smile was the only answer she received.

~

Shooting stars. That was what became visible as their eyes adjusted to the absence of airborne snow. “Every night?” Jane asked.

“Yes.”

Her mind formed competing models for how such a system could last so long. Then imagined a mythology which might be formed around these skies by a native people.

* * *

Jane opened the book; after Asgard, it didn’t surprise her that other civilizations built things to be durable for long after they were gone.

Every page was full of illustrations of orbits and eclipses, all buttressed by handwriting in a script she’d never seen before. Jane slowed but refused to stop when she felt Loki’s breath on her ear as he read over her shoulder. When he refused to budge, “Yes?”

“You’re in the past,” Loki said.

“You can read this,” Jane said, not entirely surprised.

“No. The pictures make it obvious.”

She closed her eyes. “And where are we, then? In this book,” opening her eyes and using a receipt from her pocket to bookmark this page.

With one finger, Loki moved at least fifty pages, bringing them not even to the middle of the book. “I can’t be any more specific until nightfall,” he added.

“This’ll do for now, then,” Jane said. “Thanks.”

And he drew away as swiftly as he’d arrived by her ear. Jane took the amorphous feeling she found herself with at that, and channeled it into getting a handle on the different parts of the illustrations.

~

“Three,” Jane said,” hoping her interpretation of the pictograph beside many images was correct. “One, two, three, four, five, seven.” She blinked. “Seven?? Loki!” and did not start when his hand was abruptly on her shoulder.

“Time to go,” Loki said.

“Go? We -”

“Outside. You wanted to know when we are, in that book.”

_Ah._ “I do,” Jane confirmed, and followed him outside as this planet’s larger moon slid up into the sky, the smaller one coming into view and moving slower, but inexorable.

Jane waited, feeling nothing but the glacial pace of time and the sound of Loki’s quiet breath so close to her.

The smaller moon appeared to at last break free of the horizon.

One moment of stillness.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

A quintet of opaline lights streaked across from one horizon to another.

Seven. _Ah_ , Jane thought, it making infinitely more sense now than did the five anomalous slender arcs on that part of the page. “Found our place,” she said softly.

“More than anyone else has accomplished,” Loki remarked.

~

The Norns were famous across the Nine Realms. Infamous as well.

The Thynorns were obscenely obscure by contrast, their prophetic powers veiled behind an unbroken writing system. Which left only their astronomical predictions to be knowable to the Realms…and even that was piecemeal, as so much of that knowledge as well was wrapped in the Thynorn written language.

The two of them having come back indoors after spending a time and a half outside watching the stars, Loki watched Jane working diligently on the text. _Would it be irony that a Human is the decipherer of a language spoken by crafters so ephemeral that Human lives would seem Asgardian by comparison?_ He suspected it was pride he felt right now… pride for such a fine selection of an intellectual for this task.

“Any time you wanna help,” Jane muttered at him at one point. 

“You’re doing so well on your own,” Loki observed, but he was up and on his way back over by the time she said –

“Come here.”

“Yes?” he asked, magic sliding a chair to beside Jane’s own seat for him.

“Are any of the phonetic values known?” she asked. “I’d feel better if I could say it as I work it out.”

“Only speculated sounds,” Loki said.

Her head spun around, but before she could do more than open her mouth with a sharpened tongue –

“I was under the impression that you had never had a burning desire to repeat the work of others,” Loki said.

“And I was under the impression that everything was already known.”

“And yet you came, despite despising ‘handouts’.”

“I figured at least I would be the first –“

“Human? No,” Loki said, squashing that misperception before it could flower anything.

_Oh,_ Jane thought, being of two minds about that.

“Though speaking of your findings, you are aware you can’t tell anyone,” Loki says.

“I know,” Jane says, more resigned than angry. “For one thing, there’d be the question of how I gathered any of these facts – and while SHIELD would understand the How, they wouldn’t let me publish.”

* * *

Jane copies as much of the source material as she can, and takes notes and tentative translations where she does. But eventually she looks to Loki and asks him, challengingly – always challenging, “What else is there?

And he shows her.

Sometimes they stay a single night. Other times, a full month. Always it is Jane’s call: her decision on when to pack up and go to the next point from which to observe the more singular astronomical sights…

…a Dwerrowlit, an unignighted attempt by long-gone Dwarves to create their own stars.

…the Hatchetted Pulsar, the site of one of King Buri’s few unqualified victories.

…derelict space stations, set adrift in the empty places between stars, between spiral arms, between galaxies.

…the Flooded Nebula, private territory of the goddess Rann.

…binary and trinary planets, one orbiting the other.

…stars bigger and brighter than anything on the H-R Diagram.

…the Burnished, royal estate of the god Set.

* * *

After a great deal of exploration and study, they come to another globe of gentle snows and soothing breezes.

“Where are we?” Jane asked, mentally reviewing a list of places from Norse history and myth, checking which ones had this light snow and gradual slopes. _Norway? Canada? Russia? Utgard?_

“Nidavellir,” Loki said.

“The world of the Dwarves?”

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t they have forges? And don’t they have a warrant out for your head?” Jane asked, having overheard Sif mentioning it as she had walked her from her captivity to where Thor and Loki had been waiting as the Einherjar had been in pursuit.

“No longer. And had we gone to where the forges are, we could not see…” and gestured upwards far less grandly than he might have.

Jane looked up to the sky, at the thick clot of stars overhead which tapered off to a streamer running to a horizon. “This means we’re…” she said, her mind working to fit this starscape into the cosmos as she’d known it.

“On Nidavellir.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You sound quite certain of that.”

Jane rolled her eyes.

“Someone lives here,” Loki said in case she wondered. “This is the Great Hall. That’s our destination.”

~

Stepping inside the Great Hall had been a little disarming for Jane, _I guess I was expecting more highly-advanced stuff, like in Asgard. This could be a RenFair or an interactive museum exhibit…with a cast of three, myself and Loki included._ And then there was the lord of the manor…

The King – Æglæca – of Heorot was distinctive in Jane’s eyes, from broad-splayed toes to a Roman nose. “Long have I sat upon this throne, good Loki friend of friends. Have you come to accept what I offered you so long ago?”

“I would request you bestow it upon my friend Jane Foster,” Loki said.

“Bestow what?” Jane asked.

“Heorot,” said the Æglæca. _Said Grendel,_ Jane’s mind kept amending. _Or Neanderthal._ “Cosmological seat of all Nidavellir and near worlds. Pardon, cosmo-graphic-ology, is a more apt word, yes no?”

“I suppose so. But –“

“While I sit upon this throne, my word is law, and I do not permit objections at moments such as this.” And, that said, he rises and walks away, leaving the room.

“Hold on!” Jane says, but when he pauses, looks to her, he says –

“Are you Æglæca now, to command me?”

“Of course not,” Jane says.

And he resumes his leaving.

“You knew this was going to happen,” Jane hissed at Loki.

“On the contrary,” Loki said, “I had expected him to be his usual good self and fine host, during our stay here.”

“Well stop him.”

He looked at her. “How? He is weathered proof against magic, has defeated those far better with their tongues than myself, and can wrestle Thor to a draw.”

_Huh. So, if I’m Æglæca, I can make him stop and come back, but I’m stuck in charge here. If I’m not Æglæca, then… Okay, one thing at a time._

~

If there was a transition, it went unnoticed since ‘Grendel’’s departure – Jane had been left alone to continue her studies with Loki and the polar sky. _If my answer to him meant he’s still Æglæca, then maybe he’s just taking a vacation – kings do that, after all, right?_

And later, her mind went back to Loki once again, comfortably so. _He brought me to see so much, expanded my horizons a bit more. Whether he’s on the run, or he just feels like he is, I could’ve been left at any of those other sites – or worse, he could’ve refused to answer any of my questions_.

Jane went over to where Loki stood watching a lunar-on-lunar eclipse, and wrapped her arms around one of his, leaning against him, feeling his arm heat up. She figured that Asgardians like him had a more novel system of blushing or warming than humans did.

Feeling the warming of his arm, Loki glanced down at her, his eyes remaining on Jane. “And this is for what?”

“Thanks.”

“You wanted a change. I made it happen.”

_‘The devil’s in the details’_ they say. _And you handled every detail. But I can’t complain about how any of it turned out._ “You did,” Jane agreed.

Together they watched the stars. Under the sky they stood, at ease in one another’s company.

And then she realized something: “This is … mine now, did I understand that right?” Jane asked. _This continent or planet or…oh God, the Realm entire?_

“It is,” Loki said.

“And what if I don’t want it?”

“You _don’t_ want an observatory?”

She swatted him playfully.

* * *

**It happens like this.**

Solar systems form all the time. Stability is not a difficult achievement. They go on and on, their orbits unending and eternal.

Until a new world swerves in from far elsewhere, itself knocked free of its distant home.

Now there is disruption in the new system, but rarely is it long before a new equilibrium is achieved.

The once-wanderer – _**a planet**_ in the classical sense – now belongs, a definite part of the solar system.

* * *

THE END.


End file.
